Enthusiasm for athletic victories at Wake Forest University can be measured by the toilet paper in the trees. Wake Forest students, alumni and other fans celebrate game wins by “rolling the quad,” covering the center of campus with streamers of white tissue.

Discovering that another university* counts among its unique traditions the practice of covering trees with toilet paper after school victories felt kind of like when I learned as a kid that America had, at least in name, more than one “Auburn.” I didn’t like it. So I called Jim Coffey, Wake Forest’s Director of Landscape Services, whom I was told was responsible for cleaning the campus after rollings. I was looking for apples-to-oranges distinctions that would help me prove the Demon Deacons as one-ply impostors. I wanted to feel special again. His first words were a good start.

“So y’all have a toilet paper issue at Auburn, too?” he said when he answered the phone. “I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t apologizing for bursting my bubble; he was jokingly attempting to empathize. For Coffey, the tradition is an “issue,” and a hassle.

Unlike Auburn, which contracts with a Montgomery-based commercial janitorial service for the removal of all of the toilet paper thrown into the oaks at Toomer’s Corner after an Auburn win, the powers that be in Winston-Salem are content to let their facilities management department “clean it up only when it hits the ground, like when leaves fall,” said Coffey, who had never heard of Auburn’s version of the tradition. “We go up there with a blower and clean up as much as we can when it’s over but we don’t take water hoses up there and take it out of the trees.”

Coffey said his cleanup crews range from 3 to 18 people, depending “on how heavy the toilet paper is.”

“Every once in a while a student group will volunteer to help clean it up, but then that group graduates,” he said. “It’s easier for us to consider it just a cost of doing business at Wake Forest and just do it on our own.”

General search result consensus seems to point to the aftermath of the Demon Deacon’s football win over Georgia Tech to clinch the 2006 ACC Championship as the most extensive rolling of the quad in recent memory, but the tradition supposedly started in the late 50s after the university moved from the actual town of Wake Forest to Winston-Salem. According to at least one educated guess, that’s slightly before the first substantial assaults on Toomer’s Corner began.

“On the old campus, students used to ring the bell in Wait Hall, an administration building,” Wake Forest history professor Ed Hendricks was quoted as saying in a 2006 news release. “There was a bell pull that anyone could access, including students. When the university moved… there were bells in Wait Chapel but no bell pull. Students had to find a new way to celebrate.”

Had Coffey had his way in the mid 80s, they would have had to find another new way: Coffey not only dislikes the tradition, he once deemed it expendable and led a short, albeit unsuccessful campaign to end it.

Which made me feel better; had he tried this at Auburn… well, he wouldn’t have tried this at Auburn.

“I was 26 when I got here and I thought wow, this is really worth changing, we’re going to stop it,” he said. “But as we’ve all aged in our positions, we understand that, OK, this really is part of the culture of Wake Forest… I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t see any toilet paper.”

So when does he see it?

“Kids will come out after we win a basketball or football game,” he said.

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I’m a grad student at WFU, yes they roll trees on the quad, but it’s really quite weak relative to Toomers. When I took my campus tour they mentioned rolling the trees and I just kind of laughed to myself. For one the quad is quite large compared to Toomer’s Corner so there is never that concentrated mass of people, but secondly and most importantly the football stadium and basketball arena are off campus so it’s just the students who live on campus who engage in the rolling.

All being said WFU is great, and the campus is quite beautiful. However as far as rolling is concerned there really isn’t a comparison.

Scott is misinformed. A run of the mill Quad rolling is typically not that big of a deal, and it is primarily student-oriented in those cases(as it should be). However, when there is a major victory, such as an ACC Championship, the Quad rolling is a Wake community event. Students and non-students participate and the Quad can get quite full.

In the telling of Auburn’s tradition we always seem to overlook that this “tradition” and it’s true origins at Auburn go back further than the 50s. Toomer’s Drugs was said to be the only place in town that had a telegraph… when Auburn won a game on the road, they threw the ticker tape into the trees across the street from the drugstore to let everyone know that Auburn had won. Even back in that first football game in 1892, Auburn played Georgia — and won 10-0, in Piedmont Park in Atlanta!! Auburn had no stadium. Back then the teams traveled by train too (the origins of the Wreck Tech pajama parade can be found in that). WDE!!